Going through all the comments, there are some great ideas. We are bulding a community website for entrepreneurs/startups and could probably use some of these ideas ourselves.
Here are a few more:
- Allow musicians to offer "live" concerts to their fans or to a worldwide audience, using the free Google+ hangouts or air feature. I think they just released an API. The most popular ones can be sponsored or you could just run ads on the Youtube videos and share revenues with the musicians.
- Setup a buy/sell section on the site (or on a separate subdomain or website) for used music instruments, accessories, books, sheet music etc. and either charge a small fee for listing or a transaction fee. If you don't want to run an ecommerce site, just let them list their stuff on Ebay or Amazon, but allow links to it from their profiles. These could be affiliate links and you could split the revenues with them (with full disclosure on the site).
- Have targeted email newsletters, for different interest areas. Sell advertising within the newsletters (it won't clutter your site).
I totally agree with this last point. I help run a small sailing website. We have no ads on our site, but we send out regular email newsletters that contain ads. These ads more than pay for the site itself, and we can easily switch advertisers between the newsletters. It's been a lot easier than I thought to target advertisers, because we have a load of data on how many people have subscribed and click-through rates etc. We typically sell the adverts in blocks of 3 or 6 months, where we send out 2 newsletters per month.
The most clicked-on links in that email newsletter is a list of the recent posts made to the classified section on our website. It's free to post an advert up on the classified section of something you're trying to sell, but you need to be a member of the site to do that. The newsletter acts as a reminder - so people can regularly see what's been recently posted, as they probably haven't visited that part of the website recently.
Here are a few more:
- Allow musicians to offer "live" concerts to their fans or to a worldwide audience, using the free Google+ hangouts or air feature. I think they just released an API. The most popular ones can be sponsored or you could just run ads on the Youtube videos and share revenues with the musicians.
- Setup a buy/sell section on the site (or on a separate subdomain or website) for used music instruments, accessories, books, sheet music etc. and either charge a small fee for listing or a transaction fee. If you don't want to run an ecommerce site, just let them list their stuff on Ebay or Amazon, but allow links to it from their profiles. These could be affiliate links and you could split the revenues with them (with full disclosure on the site).
- Have targeted email newsletters, for different interest areas. Sell advertising within the newsletters (it won't clutter your site).